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About Dendroctonus ponderosae

Dendroctonus ponderosae, the mountain pine beetle, is a destructive pest of pine trees in increasingly large regions of North America [1]. The beetle carries blue-stain fungus (Grosmannia clavigera [2]), a symbiont that enables the beetles to extract nutrients from the tree. Infestation by many beetles (which coordinate attacks with pheromones) can be fatal to the tree because the fungus produces filaments that block water transport. The Tria project provides genomic resources for the mountain pine beetle, blue-stain fungus, pine tree, and related-species, to assist researchers in understanding the ecological dynamics of these species.

The mountain pine beetle is the second coleopteran genome to be sequenced (the other is Tribolium castaneum), and provides a valuable comparative resource for this inordinately speciose order.